Necessity and communal work

Who knew, when our culture became modern, what would be lost? And of course, part of being modern means only looking ahead so this question is not something most of us often think about, but several people I have read lately have got me thinking about communal work.

It is often easier to do things yourself. Parents will be quick to recognize that truth. And there are all sorts of efficiencies to be gained with assembly lines. Certainly Henry Ford and his followers figured some of those out. And so I’m not trying to discard valuable ways of doing work at various times and places. But modernity has in fact often discarded traditional ways of doing work.

One woman, through her granddaughter’s blog, described wheat harvest and her small but important role pulling a wagon with coffee and cookies for the workers threshing the wheat.  The granddaughter then recounted a day working together with friends to butcher chickens. She writes, “I had been apprehensive about the day before it began, due to the unpleasant nature of the task at hand. But by evening I marveled at how much I had enjoyed it. And how exhausted I was.” http://www.goshencommons.org/category/blogs/hoof-and-wing/

Then I came upon some thoughts in an essay called ‘Economy and Pleasure’ by Wendell Berry about work.

Berry talks about the tobacco harvest: “Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work … The tobacco cutting is the most protracted social occasion of our year … The tobacco cutting is a ritual of remembrance. Old stories are retold; the dead and the absent are remembered. Some of the best talk I have ever listened to I have heard during these times...”

O yes, he almost forgets to mention that the tobacco got cut.

He finishes the essay with a sweet story about hauling a load of dirt for the barn with his five-year old granddaughter.

“We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her.

But then, after a while, she said, “Wendell, isn’t it fun?”

Perhaps not many people are aware of how much deep pleasure we have deprived ourselves in our in our embrace of modern conveniences and ways of doing things, but here’s snippet from my life. When I was much younger, I remember the kitchen was often filled - mostly with women who were cleaning up after Sunday dinner. And wasn’t it fun? What did the automatic dishwasher really give us? What did it take away?

I’m not going to try to take your dishwasher or any other modern tool away from you. But we should recognize that sometimes, as Robert Frost pointed out with perhaps glancing relevance to what I am talking about, “two roads diverged in a yellow wood… “

I believe that relationships and community are built in significant part upon our physically needing each other, our being genuinely useful to each other - even if it’s pulling a wagon with coffee and cookies.

It’s simpler if I have my own ladder or wheelbarrow, if I do my own work and you do yours. But what happens if there is almost never a time when we really need each other’s efforts or the presence of our family members or neighbors in our activities? Where does the bond for the times when we need emotional support come from?

We tend to dismiss with our words the realization that we have become an individualistic culture, but rarely do we understand how deeply that cuts. And rarely do we do much to change things.

The small church I occasionally attend has a couple of work days a year. I enjoy that participation more than sitting in the chairs on Sunday morning. But we’ve nearly forgotten how to do communal work. Each of us tends to find a task and does it. The coffee and cookies are inside and most of us trickle in on our own. Our attitudes and ways of doing things are mostly modern.

There’s a knack to almost everything. To get the full benefits of communal work, people need to establish a rhythm of working and pausing - talking and laughing and trimming the forsythia. It’s even in the prayer sometimes used after the offering: “work and worship are one.”

We like to think that such things as community should happen naturally, and of course, you shouldn’t force friendship. But when traditional cultures worked well, it was in part because people genuinely needed each other in all sorts of practical ways and because people, over generations, had learned how to literally work together.

We won’t learn to knit communities back together overnight. And if we don’t recognize what we’ve lost, we won’t even look for what we’ve lost at all.

Sometimes it helps to try to orchestrate things. My parents were likely mostly following tradition when they had me wash, my brother rinse, and my sister dry the dishes, or some other combination. It was a real task that needed to be done, and it was set up to be done together.

The task of winning a softball game, for example, has less real need behind it, but it’s not a useless exercise.

We are people of mind and body. Talking over dinner is a fine thing, but you’ll notice that even that doesn’t even ‘happen’ as often as it used to. The people who sometimes work together become different than people who always work alone.

The foundation of so many important things in life is not simply our ‘wants’ but our ‘needs.’

When we need each other’s real assistance to accomplish a necessary task, whether we want to work with this or that person or do this particular task or not, more than the work sometimes gets accomplished.

Wendell Berry writes of “poor country people” as having everything within their community but money. Now we have nearly everything that money can buy except strong communal bonds.

Maybe getting almost everything we think we want – which sometime includes the ability to not need anyone else - doesn’t lead to happiness. But people in traditional societies truly needed each other. How could people in wealthy cultures choose to be less self-reliant? Still, I have come to believe that necessity is the mother of a lot more than invention. We can’t just talk about wanting to build community. I think, perhaps, we will need to build more barns together.

Working together might also turn out to be more fun than we imagined.